Review Summary

“The Big Fix” is an enraged exposé of the crimes of Big Oil, specifically BP, which has been accused of negligence and of taking shortcuts that helped lead to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast in April 2010. Eleven workers on the platform died and nearly five million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico over the next five months, killing vast numbers of marine animals before much of it washed ashore, where it wrought incalculable damage. The most serious of the film’s assertions is that BP used tremendous amounts of Corexit, an oil dispersant whose toxic effects on the environment and on human health are as bad, or worse, than exposure to oil. Even after BP agreed to stop using Corexit, the movie insists, it has secretly continued to do so. It presents ample, devastating evidence to suggest that the air, as well as the water in Louisiana, has been contaminated. Directed by Josh Tickell and his wife, Rebecca Harrell Tickell, “The Big Fix” begins with a concise history of BP, then narrows its focus to Louisiana, which it describes as a corrupted United States “oil colony.” The Tickells travel there with the actor Peter Fonda, but his celebrity presence doesn’t get them very far, and he all but disappears from the movie. — Stephen Holden